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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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That's fair. Do you have an example of a community that is a) left-leaning, b) claims to be fundamentally opposed to political violence in all forms, and c) exists?

Ending Nazi Germany was political violence. I think this is too strict a criterion.

If someone wants to establish a more narrow one, I'll work with them on that. Or, if it turns into another two-step of 'i hate violence'-'punch the nazi', where 'nazi' includes everyone to the right of 2015 Obama, point that out. But I need something to work with.

At some point you need to look at the object level. The problem with "I want to kill Jews" compared to "I want to kill Hitler" is not the advocacy of violence, it's that Jews are not a deserving target, while Hitler is.

Something that should usually work, however, would be two steps: First, we're talking about personal or mob violence. Having your government declare war on Germany and sending soldiers in really isn't the issue. Second, if someone actually thinks violence is needed, they should be willing to kill, not just to punch--this avoids people who advocate violence performatively or want to commit violence only on weaker people without any risks. If they pass these tests and still want to kill the Jews or Republicans, see above: they're evil, but you do need to look at the object level to see why.

Yes, there's a lot of ways to square the circle; I've given similar answers (albeit with self-defense and necessity prongs) when Trace chased me down in DMs back on reddit to test my principles against Arthur Chu (yes, really).

But Trace denied that, at length, both in DM and publicly, and his rule got them to TheSchism today. Nor does some other part of the Blue Tribe have a well-established principle that they're holding here, that applies to both their side and their enemies in a wide variety of cases. It's the existence of the norm, not the possibility of one, that's the issue.