Comment by wat10000
5 days ago
I don’t understand. Your previous comment was saying that the US has the right to use force to get back assets that Venezuela seized. Since I’m an American taxpayer, that means the US has the right to force me to help with this. Now you’re saying I shouldn’t be. That seems like the exact opposite of your previous statement.
I completely agree that this is happening regardless of what I think and all we can really do is consider how we got here. But that wasn’t at all the comment I was replying to.
> Didn't say American taxpayers should have to help. I fully agree any self-help should be fully funded by the victim and not the taxpayers. I completely agree with your argument; simultaneously I'd argue they do have the right to fund an operation to seize their assets.
Huh? You commented on an American military operation by saying that if someone steals from you then you have the right to use force to retrieve it.
Was that just a total non sequitur? Were you just saying the oil companies have the right to use force, unrelated to the US military, on a comment thread that is specifically about the US using military force?
Sorry for the wonkiness, I now have an extra comment to reply in-sequence. Thank you for your grace in handling that and the inconvenience there.
I think the crux of your difficulty of understanding is not understanding the difference between a victim being able to fight back, a victim being able to fight back with the assistance of a willing proxy, and the wrongness to force 3rd parties to pay.
It is possible that Exxon has the right to fight back. And that Exxon can use a mercenary force to effect that effort. It is possible that the US military is a mercenary force. The wrong part would be that the mercenary force forced you to pay. Not that Exxon might get justice via proxy.
It can be simultaneously true that a mercenary force could act justly, while also being true they did not act justly, in part because they also used violence against uninvolved 3rd parties (in this case, taxation against you and perhaps also violence against some uninvolved Venezuelans). I think that is the case here.
I’m not sure why you’re talking about hypotheticals where a different act could be just. I thought we were talking about what’s actually happening. In the context of a news story about US military actions that I help pay for, you stated that force is justifiable to recover stolen property. Either this describes what we’re actually discussing i.e. the actual events taking place, or it’s a confusing non sequitur.
Let me be explicitly clear in the context, and take on good faith you're just not understanding.
In this particular, concrete event I believe Exxon had the right as a victim to take back their assets, and I believe that the funding of the US military by taxes is immoral, the very act of the people doing so is moral only so far as it does not affect innocent third parties such as yourself or go beyond compensation for the theft. I think I have been pretty clear about this, that in the concrete I think it's simultaneously true that recovery is justified but the funding method was not.
I do believe the US military actions insofar as they recover stolen property is justified, but not the funding mechanism by which they've done so. I'm not sure why this is hard to understand -- if say the police recover your stolen bicycle I can remark the police had a right to go get it even though the police have done it in the wrong way by using violence to tax 3rd parties to go get it. In this case two results -- the victim by proxy rightly recovered the stolen property but also wrongly used violence against third parties to achieve it, both simultaneously true. You are trying to muddy things by suggesting if I agree with one I must agree with the other.
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