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And to you I post this quote. It is appropriate for you are one who will not risk, but do criticise.

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat." -Theodore Roosevelt

Or this - " The only reason we sleep soundly in our beds is because there are hard ruthless men who are ready to visit violence in the night upon those who would do us harm."

"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last." - Winston Churchill

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke

"War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth fighting for is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing he cares about more than his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself." - author unknown.

Nothing I have said speaks to my tolerance for risk (you know nothing about that...), nor is that what any of this about. The Roosevelt quote is a good one, but not a justification for the entangling alliances proscribed by Washington (the man, not the institution), the failure to appreciate & embrace being directly correlated to the warmongering, imperialism, & "nation-building" which directs so much enmity toward us from the rest of the world. Far too many of those who would 'do us harm' are motivated by instigations from the very 'hard, ruthless men' you champion (you may even be one yourself). These "men" (see Thoreau's description of the Marine, previous post), & their politician-masters do not act on my behalf - they have their own, self-interested, agendas. The state creates murderous adversaries who would otherwise be unknown to us (not to mention taxing the hell out of us to fund the process); this makes for 'sound sleep'? One cannot simultaneously instigate & appease...have another drink, Winston, and recall how your country's actions in WW1 contributed to the German resolve to smash your cities in WW2 (& round & round we go...). Me & thee are the ones to die; most of the politicians & their business partners live on to start more trouble. As for crocodiles, any who attempt to eat me will be rendered into luggage. As for Burke, YES, and for evil to triumph much, much more quickly, all good men have to do is to continually duped by the amoral "leaders" (or, is this a form of 'doing nothing' - as in, intellectual sloth..?). As for the final quote, another strange conflation. Defending against uninstigated attacks is a moral imperative; creating vicious enemies & then expressing moral outrage when bloodshed ensues is farcical, hypocritical. Initiate force & moral authority evaporates & all that remains is Darwinian kill-or-be-killed - and there is nothing honorable, patriotic or civilized about that.