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Hard for me to take that crap about not initiating violence seriously. I mean if someone threatens me, I'm a firm believer in a pre-emptive first strike.

I tend to believe the pre-emptive strike more appropriate in certain very limited aspects of foreign relations, i.e. Israel's 1981 takeout of Iraq's first nuclear reactor, after Saddam Hussein was fool enough to announce to the world the primary purpose of that reactor was to aid in the production of weapons to use against Israel. (The world screamed bloody murder when the Israeli jets went ring-a-ding-ding on the reactor, but Saddam Hussein sure was a good boy outside the Iraq-Iran war for almost a decade.)

It is, further, an accepted enough tenet of libertarian political philosophy that a nation - any given nation - has every last right on earth to prepare and sustain a defence for itself against any prospect, imminent or distant, of foreign aggression. (One of the questions I think valid to ask in the wake of the atrocities of 11 September is whether such atrocities might have been arrested had the United States prepared and sustained a more profound defencive defence apparatus, it being so that we actually have a strong enough offencive defence apparatus as witness our success in the physical war in Afghanistan.) I was, moreover, quite shocked to see a number of libertarians and Libertarians alike (the former do not always join the latter party, a distinction only too many FREEP anti-libertarians find only too convenient to forget or ignore) ignoring if not dismissing the salient point that, whatever had or had not transpired prior to those atrocities, those very atrocities were an explicit and deliberate exercise of force against the United States and, therefore, the United States was entitled unquestionably to respond as the United States deemed fit.

In a dispute between two individuals, though, it is one thing to make a threat but something else entirely to move toward executing the threat. If for example someone merely threatens to shoot me but makes no move toward doing it, he's done nothing except to shoot his big mouth off. But if he makes the threat and makes the move to execute it, at that precise moment I would be justified entirely in any action I deemed appropriate to take in order to stop him, even to the point of drawing and firing a gun, if I owned one, at the moment I saw him actually going for a weapon to use upon me.

Aside from which, the actual language of that position reads "initiation of force," which initiation does not always have to involve physical force, as witness blackmail or other non-physical coercion.