How successful do you think these are, empirically?

Roughly: everything good in all of history is from voluntary means. (Defensive force is acceptable but isn't a positive source of good, it's an attempt to mitigate the bad.) This is a standard (classical) liberal view emphasized by Objectivism. Do you have much familiarity? There are also major aggressive-force/irrationality connections, b/c basically ppl initiate force when they fail to persuade (as William Godwin pointed out) and force is anti-error-correction (making ppl act against their best judgement; and the guy with a gun isn't listening to reason).

@torture: The words have meanings. I agree many people use them imprecisely, but there's no avoiding words people commonly use imprecisely when dealing with subjects that most people suck at. You could try to suggest better wording to me but I don't think you could do that unless you already knew what I meant, at which point we could just talk about what I meant. The issues are important despite the difficulty of thinking objectively about them, expressing them adequately precisely in English, etc. And I'm using strong words b/c they correspond to my intended claims (which people usually dramatically underestimate even when I use words like "torture"), not out of any desire for emotional impact. If you wanted to try to understand the issues, you could. If you want it to be readily apparent, from the outset, how precise stuff is, then you need to start with the epistemology before its parenting implications.