Seems this guy thinks he's produced an unassailable argument by claiming that his precious monopoly on violence uses only "retaliatory" force, which is legitimate because it is only used to enforce "objective law" through "courts and due process."
But... where is the argument? 🤔
“Retaliatory” changes the nature of it completely. A murderer using force against his victim and police using force to arrest the murderer are not morally or legally equivalent merely because both involve force.
The entire question is when force is legitimate. Calling that distinction “fantastic” doesn't eliminate it, it just avoids arguing against it.
Who enforces the boundary? Objective law, courts and due process. Now answer my question: when your competing agencies disagree about that boundary, who has final jurisdiction?
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You literally quoted the argument while asking where it is. The distinction is between initiating force and using force in response to its initiation. If that distinction is meaningless, then the murderer and the person stopping the murderer are morally equivalent because both “use violence.”
The actual question is whether competing private enforcers solve the problem of objectively determining who initiated force, or merely create competing claims backed by competing guns.
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I can't tell if you're serious or not. I'm not asking you to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate violence but to explain why (by what means) your monopoly on violence is kept to doing only the former. Why doesn't your State go beyond what you say is legitimate?
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The simple explanation is that “the state” is not one entity. We separate police and military, the judiciary is independent, we include internal affairs departments, all of these involve many people, and ultimately there’s democratic accountability.
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Right, just like Apple is not an entity. There is a development department, bookkeeping, marketing, HR, and so on.
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Meh, it’s not really a great analogy. A company, no matter how large, is not like a government, but there are similarities.
Anyway, that’s a distraction from my original point, which you’ve dodged.
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No, I didn't dodge it - I didn't take it seriously and rejected it outright. That the State divides its coercive operations into supposedly distinct branches does not change the nature of it one bit.
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Are you trying to be cute or are you actually claiming that departments of an organization make them different entities? What do you think are the implications of that claim?
Sep 21, 2026 · 3:58 PM UTC
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