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No. And I don't believe moral statements about "right" and "wrong" can have any objective or absolute truth to them. I do make moral judgments, but I do not claim them to be objective fact, nor based on a system of underlying logical premises (such as "it's always wrong to use force" or whatever). I think invading Iraq was wrong, because there were no good reasons for it and we killed lots of people, destroyed lots of [censored] and I could go on, but that should be enough.


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i disagree with the formation of the US government for the same reasons.

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The US government was formed by killing people and blowing [censored] up?

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there is a larger military presence there now then before. the military now is also much more technologically advanced and well funded.

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Yeah, but a foreign military is going to have a much harder time dealing with another country's disputes than a local military that's been around for a long time and that most of the people consider legitimate.
I don't know the exact cause of the chaos in Iraq and I think pointing to any one thing as "the cause" is a mistake.

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That's not a fair comparison. We'd have to compare the current Iraq to an Iraq in which we invaded, occupied the country, dismantled the military and then propped up a new dictator.


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not sure what you're getting at here. we're comparing democracy to dictatorship.

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What I mean is those things are all confounding variables. If we compare dictatorship to democracy when there are a ton of other significant variables differing in the two circumstances then the comparison isn't valid.


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How can they be enforced if not by law?


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they should be enforced by law. laws should be private though. david friedman rights a lot on this topic for one and id suggest checking out some stuff on law and economics.

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What book would you recommend that explains how laws can be private? What is a private law anyway? Isn't law public by definition. I think you mean the enforcement would be private. But can they enforce whatever laws they're paid to enforce (e.g. something like "Sunis can't worship freely and can't insult that guy that the Shi'ites like so much")? Who comes up with the laws? It doesn't seem fundamentally different from state coercion to me.

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I have a feeling some of those 'unique ways' are going to include murder and terrorism.

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apparently you think people blow themselves up for no reason. i tend to give them more credit. there is substantive evidence that all major acts of terrorism are politically motivated too btw.

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You should stop reading so much into what I say. I never said they do it for no reason.