Legit

I have a huge boner for this Charlie Davis post, but of course, I rise for just about anything that pisses and coughs in the direction of: "The state is the entity that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, force and coercion." Goodness! I think of the State's soi-disant legitimacy monopoly as vaguely Microsoftische, with your various Talibans &c. playing iPad to the clunky desktop OS. There is no control panel, man. Like, it's totally user interface. Violence unmediated by pulldown menus. You get the picture. The State's claims to the legitimate use of violence and coercion are all enforced by violence and coercion anyway. Ask a dead Pashtun tribesman if he thinks the American bomb that killed him was any more legitimate than the misfired bullet in a Homewood carjacking and see what he's got to say. Anyway, lots of violence and coercion have arguments for their own legitimacy. Getting your kneecaps broken because you're shorting on payments to your bookie is just as legit as wage garnishment for failure to pay back taxes. Right? Wrong? Why?

Like Charlie and Jon, I find myself flapping between a grin and a frown when considering the amount of ink and air good liberals spend justifying their little death machine on the grounds that, though it is a shame to kill all those foreigners, some little old lady's SSI check makes it all worthwhile. Here we have Barack Obama arguing that we have to keep killing people in order that we soemday reach a point when we can stop killing them responsibly, and I'm supposed to believe that the great threat to my own democracy whiskey sexy is a gang of underemployed flyover yahoos who want to yell slogans at the government and unwittingly hitch themselves to a domestic false flag operation? Girl, please.