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Comment by Aeolun | Hacker News Reader

The point of war is enforcing your will through violence. You can skip the violence, but then bullies would essentially be unrestricted.

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There's no single point to war. It can be anything from enjoying the destruction and killing and torture and lack of rules, to "retribution" (for people who are into thinking of other people in terms of arbitrarily and vaguely defined groups), though creating chaos to get political advantage, to distraction from political issues, or really whatever...

"War" for the sake of "war" is pointless. It should be tied to a political objective for some kind of gain.

Ideally, it would be the last resort in limited capacity when diplomacy fails.

Otherwise you're unleashing horrors on humanity.

Do you think there is a difference between killing people and violence ?

You can have violence without killing people, for example in torture the goal is generally not to kill the recipient.

And if a doctor has a surgery that goes bad and the patient died, they may have killed someone, but there was no violence.

But you can't have killing without violence.

I guess if you get extremely broad with the term but starvation isn't often classified as violence.

If the starvation is intentional it's a kind of violence ?

Smallpox, radiation leaks, freezing to death etc are all causes of death that can be engineered but not generally labeled as violence. What definition are you using?

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