The social contract
Asguard said:
Is it ethical to teach young adolessent highschool aged children that its ok to kill?
If the mob set up a "hitman" school would that be ethical?
I think they're separate issues. In order to combine them under a single regard, we must first abandon the social contract, in general.
Even in terms of JROTC, which isn't particularly common anymore, though my old high school has an unused rifle range on its roof, these young killers to be are being trained to defend the social contract.
The mob school would constitute training to an alternate, competing social contract.
True, the issue is clouded some as even "free" governments look more and more like rackets these days, but consider someone like me.
I don't like the government much. It certainly doesn't like me. The government would throw me in jail if it could catch me. I am, after all, a pot smoker and, by custom—and through custom, by definition—a drug trafficker. (Almost
every stoner is, technically, guilty of trafficking drugs. Pass the duchie on the left-hand side? You've just delivered a controlled substance.)
But this does not mean I'm in with the mob. Indeed, the more organization I see in a black-market operation, the less secure I feel around it. Well, okay, after a point. Thinking back, for instance, to a former supply line out of Canada. My dealers were great. Their suppliers? I didn't trust them at all insofar as doing business with them directly was, by my assessment, risky. In the first place, I didn't want to be moving that much product. In the second, there comes a point at which the market becomes dangerous because there is enough money in it. Eighty bucks? Nobody's going to lean on me for that. A thousand bucks? Yeah, I'll feel some gravity. More than that? Well, I don't want to feel
any gravity on the supply side.
By the time we get to "the mob"? Hell no. I don't like buying from gangs. I don't like buying from well-polished guys in suits. As it is, my growers are, more often than not, small. And the one supplier I know is getting big-op bud? It's shitty bud. Ropy and variable, harvested and cured wrong. I'm getting better stuff from the smaller operations, the local ones. The ones where the stuff isn't emergency-harvested, quick-cured with artificial heat, and then packed into the seat compartment on a motorcycle to be driven overland across the Canadian border and down to Seattle where it's picked over by five or six people competing with one another, picked over again at home, and then the leavings are distributed out at the street level. Stuff up from Mexico? I only encounter it peripherally. Someone passing a joint at a show, or something. It's
shit. We call it
dirt weed for a reason.
So even from my middling position, I'll take the social contract of government. At least if the cops shoot me for no good reason, people will find my body.
As to "military schools" in general, I think they're simply a breeding ground for abusive, repressed homosexuality.
