> My point is that we should all be fighting against war.

By what, asking nicely?

Yes. Be very persuasive. But restrict yourself to persuasion.

The way is for the antiwar people to be more successful than warriors and turn war into the losers' choice.

I refuse to arm myself, refuse to serve in militaries and refuse to support war as much as i am able. If antiwar people are successful, war will evolve out.

Persuasion has already been tried and failed. If someone comes to kill you will you fight, or just lay down and die? In the real world sometimes those are the only two options. To believe otherwise is simply utopian naivety.

Do you think Ukraine can persuade Putin to call off the invasion? If they didn’t defend themselves, they’d be a Russian province or puppet state today.

That’s always the unfortunate downside of relying on only persuasion. Some people will just take what they want if you don’t force them to stop.

Just read about how well persuasion (aka “appeasement”) worked in the buildup to WW2. Spoiler: it didn’t.

In the specific case of Ukraine, a people's war of national liberation is a pretty classic form of nation building. That's how a lot of nations came about. The Taliban are a particularly bad analogy, because they represent regionalist resistance against central government in Afghanistan. Countries like Italy, the USA, or Vietnam were formed in this manner.

> the warlike will win and then naturally turn their guns towards the locals

Whether they do that as a democratic government, a dictatorship, a paragovernamental entity, or a set of mobs makes all the difference in the world.

Anyone pointing a gun at me is not my friend. Anyone that chooses a gun to get their way is not my friend.

I don't trust people with guns. They are the same because they all choose violence to get their way.

"Democratic" gun holders point more guns at me today than mobs.

The main problem with a pacifist approach is Darwinism. When the violent can herd/control/kill the non-violent. Then the next generation of people are likely to be of the dominant.

Words and persuasion are all very good, until you meet people who simply don't care.

The nature of the entire thing is that usually there is exactly one of those entities pointing their guns at you. So yeah, that one will have "most guns pointed at you".

You can have more than one, but it's a huge life vs. death issue. You can't have zero.