Vic, You criticize expansionism, yet you just finished advocating an aggressive expansionist philosophy: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them all to libertarianism!" And you did it in the name of liberty. Plenty of past expansionists have done the same in the name of the same. Your brand is not the slightest bit new or unique; it's just another in a long line that promises liberty, but ends in tyranny.
I'm not totally clear on your usage of some terms like unilateral/bilateral and relative/objective/absolute/single, but I think I can sufficiently direct my reply to your N Korea example. If you think you can prove that N Korea is a credible threat, there is nothing libertarian that prevents you from doing something about it. But that is not the extent of what you advocate. You advocate forcing OTHERS to do your aggressing for you, paying them with money forced from OTHERS without their consent, to aggress against innocent (until proven guilty) OTHERS on their property. You have a very long way to go before you can turn that into justifiable self defense. You would want to start by indicating the individuals you think are the credible threat, then proving it with evidence. In other words, if your small friend is getting attacked in front of you, there is nothing stopping you from stepping in to protect him or fight his fight. But that is a far cry from forcing others to do your dirty work for you; to travel to a distant place, paying them with stolen money, to apply non-consensual violence upon those you THINK might travel to your location and attack your small friend in the distant future with no more evidence/justification than hearsay. -Mark as worded the principle is too cut and dry. for example it takes nothing into consideration about psychological and emotional violence. under the current wording its quite ok to browbeat people into doing whatever you like so long as you make no physical threat. further it says nothing about alies. what if your alies are under physical agression? why should you not initiate physical force to protect and defend them. what constitutes a credible threat? does stockpiling nuclear weapons constiture a credible threat? what if your inteligence is unable to penetrate to find the real plans? do you wait till you receive a cripling blow preventing you from retaliating? then its too late. thats what NAP invites. events are often clouded and confused and lacking information. each person at the scene of an accident will report different stories. certainly under stressful situations the credibility of threat is entirely subjective. what about unrelated third parties. why should you not come to their rescue? its almost inhuman to let them suffer at the hands of some brutaliser. take an expansionist ideology, it makes no bones about the fact that its aims is to overthrow liberty. is that sufficient a credible threat? why in this case should allow that idealogy to gain sufficient strength to really pose a threat? unilateral NAP in the light of dangerous ideologies is itself a major expoitable weakness. liberty has a long history of being won by overthrowing regimes, from the way before the french revolution, to the war of independence, the civil wars. etc virtually all wars about some form of liberty. imo a bilateral agreement specifically between countries should state that both side will live under freedom. atruce between a free country and a totalitarian state is a cop out. its an abandonment of the pople who are stuck and cant free themselves. thats not an appealing moral position. my feeling is that people use the NAP to try and create an aboslute world with no relatives. where every situation is just an application of a single principle. now I am very pro objectivism, and the idea that life must come first to me is paramount, but, I dont for a moment beleive that relativism is to be totally rejected. on the contrary I arrive at an objectivist position on the proviso that absolutism or non-relativism occurs principly by agreement. in other words we can agree within certain room for error that something can be treated as absolute in many cases, but not in all cases. in regards to placing life as primary what then when its one life traded off for another? for example nth korea is brutalising some minority. it seems the hard core libertarian position is to say, ok get out of the way not our problem. thats not right to me. thats a clear case of unilateral NAP serving no purpose but to tacitly consent to a crime. the NAP needs to be interpreted case by case and certainly never unilateraly. Vic ForumWebSiteAt http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Libertarian Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Libertarian/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Libertarian/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
