[ALawPoker]

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But once you've done that? How do you stop irrational fanatics without coercing them?

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You can't. Irrationality is irrational. As long as some act irrationally, there will always be problems. The question shouldn't be "how can I entirely eliminate the problem" as much as it should be "which action makes me slightly better off." The idea that all perceived problems can be fixed is very flawed, imo, and thus dangerous.

I grew up in a Republican home, so it was hard for me to break the bias that told me an invasive foreign policy was a good thing for me. Most of the canned liberal rhetoric is horrible, so that doesn't help. And since I'm not a limp-dicked vegan hippie who refuses to wear shoes, I never cared for the ideal of "non-violence" in any knee-jerk/intangible sense.

But then when you logically consider "blowback" and the broader idea that tangible consequence will always exist, it becomes clear that the heroic action is to consider that you will actually be making yourself less safe every time you act shortsightedly and forcibly restrict someone else's action. If they were inhuman and would not react, then it might be possible that you'd be doing yourself a good service to preemptively attack. But accepting that they would probably react the same way you or I would, it's pretty clear that it's impossible to make yourself safer by attacking first.

The natural order of things makes it so animals who harm members of their own species will always be harming themselves in some tangible way. United Nations resolutions or the currency by which oil is sold aren't so important that they override the consequence that billions or so years of evolutionary progress have ingrained in our condition.