An Open Letter To The Peace Movement: Reply To A Friend’s Criticism’s Expanded

Source: c4ss.org --- Friday, January 10, 2014
In a previous post ; the following was said: You’re more concerned with property values than human freedom. What’s truly destructively selfish is your willingness to use initiatory force to uphold your property values. Freedom matters more. My interlocutor responded to the comment thusly: It’s not that I’m more concerned with property values than personal freedom (that’s the way an ideologue with a rigid value system phrases things)–these are things that have to be weighed, and in general, our society has more or less held that attacks against property by actions that lower its value are just one step away from outright theft. If you destroy the value, don’t you also destroy the effective use of the property? I thought the libertarian bunch thought that property rights have a major role in human progress. Maybe I misread all that Locke stuff. Anyhow, your false dichotomy between property and freedom (whatever that is) pretty much reveals a passive-aggressive debate strategy that really irritates. It’s pretty much why most people don’t cotton to ideologues. If you step on their ideological toes, they hurl accusations of being “destructively selfish” for (as in my example) trying to defend my property against the passive-aggressive encroachment of some jerk using his property to his advantage but very much against mine. I didn’t say I was going to shoot the son of a bitch, I thought I was going to take him to court or before the zo ...